About the Author

I was raised on the East Coast, enduring the freezing winters and loving New York pizza by the slice, the kind you fold in half and start eating with the hot melted cheese dripping down into your mouth. It's the best I've ever tasted, hands down. After being stationed in the San Francisco Bay area while in the Army, I decided to remain in California, where college and grad school tuition was cheaper and the climate more temperate. Now a psychologist, I live here in the sun with my wife and daughter, an elderly Maltese, a brawny Pekingese, and a voracious cat that eats more than both dogs combined. I don't really regret leaving the snow and the cold behind, but I do still miss the pizza.

I have been enamored with science fiction/fantasy since I was (as my Georgia-born southern grandmother used to say) "knee-high to a grasshopper." Truly, I could open a used bookstore stocked with nothing but the stacks and boxes of books that I own in the genre, some going way back. Thank the gods for ebooks, because I ran out of room to store the hard copy collection many moons ago. My early loves were authors like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin. More recent influences include R.A. Salvatore, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Raymond Feist and Jacqueline Carey, among many others.

I enjoy reading, RPG video games, canning homegrown fruits for preserves, old time radio, more reading, and attending Highland Games festivals (the "M" in my name is for McMaster, after my Scotch-Irish ancestors on my mother's side). In my more extravagant days, I actually had a kilt custom-made in Scotland that was based on the McMaster clan tartan. It's quite beautiful, though all that wool is very heavy. I've been promising to learn how to play "Scotland the Brave" on the bagpipes for too long to take myself seriously anymore, but perhaps one day…